


Twenty Random Facts About Will Riker (And Deanna Troi... And A Few Other People)

by Leyenn



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-16
Updated: 2009-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-03 02:32:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leyenn/pseuds/Leyenn





	Twenty Random Facts About Will Riker (And Deanna Troi... And A Few Other People)

**1.**

Will Riker belongs to Deanna Troi. He has always belonged to Deanna Troi, and he will always belong to Deanna Troi.

The first time she said this, he felt a little concerned she was about to whip out a signed bond of ownership, like the antique folds of thick paper they saw behind sterile transparent aluminium cases in the Betazed Museum of Ancient History. There were even a few with the seal of the Fifth House in there. He was surprised at being surprised, on realising that her name goes back that far. Deanna teased him that perhaps they could just swap surnames and call it even.

  


**2.**

Will graduated eighth overall in his class at the Academy, but first in Advanced Strategic Planning and only nineteenth in Ancient Cultures. He really liked the study material for the latter, but he ended up skipping through the final essay in favor of taking Alicia deSilva out for dinner. They only dated for a week but it was still definitely worth placing last in the class.

He caught up with Alicia the last time he was on Earth and found out she'd left Starfleet after Wolf 359 to run a private science team in Geneva. He didn't mention this to the Captain, just the way he doesn't mention anything about Wolf to the Captain any more - because there's nothing more to say or because he's afraid there is, he's not sure.

  


**3.**

He's wished more than once that his father had died instead of his mother. It was a nightly prayer when he was fifteen. Deanna says it's only natural, that it's only a thought and he shouldn't worry. He still hates himself when he thinks it. (And sometimes it occurs to him that she still lets him.)

  


**4.**

He got his first trombone when he was eight, when Kyle objected strenuously to him playing the old piano that had been his mother's. The instrument was bought in a hurry on an Ambassador's wages without consulting him: it was too big for his hands and his chest, since Kyle forgot how tall he was, and it was strangely designed, some modern style thing, because that was simply the most expensive in the store and Kyle never thought that Will loved the piano for its history as much as the memories.

He gave his first trombone away when he was thirteen to a girl in his class - for her little brother, for whom it was probably too big and the wrong style, but Will got a kick out of her smile, and he figured the kid wouldn't mind.

  


**5.**

His favorite food to cook is classic Italian pasta with an Andorian twist, hand-making it from scratch and getting flour all over his hands. His favorite food to eat depends on how - or with whom - he's eating it.

  


**6.**

He thinks keeping a written record of the people he's had sex with would be a bit crass. This doesn't stop him having a search programmed into his personal log for when he's trying to remember if last night will be a hundred or a hundred and nine.

  


**7.**

Will is what a few centuries ago would have been referred to as bisexual, before the Human race worked out that there are far more than two sexes in the galaxy.

When he's interested in a woman he's quite obvious about it, but it must seem like he sleeps with them more often than he really does. When he's interested in a guy, which is less often, he must be more subtle about it because no one seems to notice even though he rarely finishes the night alone. When it was neither-and-both, he's just glad it didn't get all over the ship that he'd lost his mind and risked his career to keep it from ending.

  


**8.**

Then there's Deanna, who doesn't care who (or what) else he has sex with besides her, even if he's been in her bed the night before. It is her business, in fact it's very much her business, but more because it's nigh on impossible for her to miss what's going on in the next room over than because he shouldn't be doing it.

Deanna says it's like the galaxy is a bookshelf that he can't stop reading from in case he misses something new. He thinks that's a very delicate way of saying his sex drive is a little too high to be stable (not 'faithful' - he's always faithful, just occasionally to more than one person at a time). Both of them agree that the metaphor doesn't matter, particularly, as long as she's the language at the heart of it all.

Most of the time he doesn't think about how his love life looks to other people, but when he does he thinks even his close friends must have a strange opinion of him.

  


**9.**

He met Geordi La Forge when he joined the Academy Jazz Band and Geordi was a roadie. Will could tell the guy would be a great engineer even then. Geordi could fix _anything_, as well as being able to take the amps apart and put them back together in five minutes flat with a migraine and his VISOR off.

It really shocked him to find Geordi working as a helm officer, although to get on the _Enterprise_ he'd have taken whatever was on offer as well. He mounted a subtle year-long campaign to convince Picard about that transfer: this is still one of the greatest triumphs of his career.

  


**10.**

Will has served aboard eleven starships. These he does keep a list of.

The _Pegasus_ is now deceased and good riddance. The _Fortuna_, where his abiding memory is of Kathy Li and being _far_ too young to know any better. The _Hood_, once after Betazed and once before the _Enterprise_, so it feels a little like a bookend for that period of his life. The _Potemkin_ NCC-18253, actually the second ship with that name, which was almost the unremarkable assignment of his career until eight years later.

The _Yorktown_. With Deanna. Painful would probably be the word. Brief, too, for mainly that reason.

After the _Hood_ again, there was the _Enterprise-D_, which is too much a part of him to fit down to a single memory. That ship gave him his secondment to the _Pagh_; his first command, the old and unbeatable _Hathaway_; his third, the _Excalibur_, and that little stint on a pirate ship as someone else.

The _Enterprise-E_ is the last and latest - and best, according to the specs, but he still finds himself missing the pastel walls and dealing with the children.

  


**11.**

He's been offered command of seven ships in his time. He doesn't hold the record for number of offers but he is legendary for saying no. (Ironic, that.)

The _Drake_ he turned down for the simple reason that he wanted to serve on the flagship. When Jean-Luc Picard thinks you're worthy, you don't turn that away lightly.

The _Aries_, he did intend to accept, right up until he realised how stupid he was for thinking he could leave her again.

He turned the _Melbourne_ down twice - once unofficially, and then again nine months later when they called to say it was rebuilt and still waiting for a captain. In between those he accepted the _Enterprise_ and slept half as much with that rank on his shoulders. He was glad to give it back for a lot of reasons, some of which he doesn't look at too closely.

They did offer him the _Voyager_ but he didn't want it. He knew the name under his was Kathryn's and she deserved it more, was more the scientist. This of course meant another round of guilt on his shoulders when they disappeared, but it's not as if he's not used to that by now. Sometimes he wonders if he's going to be offered another ship of his own and if he's going to care too much if he isn't.

  


**12.**

The first time he thought he was in love was at fifteen years old on his first solo trip to San Francisco. The feeling was quite convincing to a teenage boy just finding out what sex was all about. She was a lot older and it was never going to last; he still held onto how it felt, convinced that he knew what he was looking for, when he decided he had the time.

The first time he fell in love he was twenty-four, naked, and realised that fifteen year olds don't know anything at all and that apparently the really important things in life choose their own time.

  


**13.**

Will did intend to marry Deanna Troi. Even when he wrote and left her the letter that said he wasn't coming to Risa, he didn't think that it wouldn't happen one day. It just didn't feel like that was the right time. He didn't think Starfleet would promote him the way he wanted if he were tied to the Betazoid aristocracy quite that securely.

To set things straight, what happened after that was roughly this:

Deanna left Risa, pissed as all hell at him, and called him a month later from her dorm room at the Academy. He was surprised to hear from her, to say the least, since by then he'd been a little bit terrified that she never wanted to see him again and far _too_ terrified to do anything about it.

He doesn't quite remember the details of what was a painful conversation. Deanna doesn't either. This is most likely for the best.

Convinced he'd made a complete fuck-up of it afterwards, he wrote to her to try and explain again, better. He stopped the letter when it reached twelve pages of barely readable type. Two days after that he drank most of a bottle of synthehol and sent it.

Deanna wrote back by hand. (He still has the letter. He still has all her letters, come to that.) She said that she appreciated how hard he'd tried; she told him about her classes in the Counselling Corps; she admitted that maybe they hadn't been ready, which was the most elaborate lie she's ever told and the most obvious one he's ever read on paper.

He wrote back again asking if she had Solek for Biological Sciences, offering his help if she ever needed it. He thought afterwards that this was a particularly uncomfortable thing to say, but he didn't really regret it. The offer was sincere.

She never did take him up on it.

They wrote back and forth through her year of study on Earth, while he moved up to First Officer. She didn't tell her mother they were talking and he didn't go to her graduation - but when he helped her unpack on the _Enterprise-E_, he found the card from the twelve roses he had hand-delivered from that little florist on the beachfront.

He knew she was on the _Yorktown_, and he knew they were going to end up working together, and this is why he managed somehow not to read the crew manifest for the _Enterprise_ until the day after he beamed up, because he was just a little afraid of history repeating itself exactly the way it did.

He spent a total of sixty days aboard the _Yorktown_ and then applied for the position on the _Hood_ while she was on shore leave. He didn't say goodbye. They don't do goodbyes.

Twenty-two sixty-three happened with a kind of silence. He got involved with a few people, refused to let deSoto beam down to Altair, got uninvolved with a few more people. Deanna didn't write: he didn't call her, didn't know what she was up to and pretended that maybe this was the better way to go about it.

Then the new year ticked around and fate, as it tends to in Will Riker's life, interfered to offer him the choice of the _Drake_ or the _Enterprise_, which as it turned out was a choice between having a lonely life at the top or finding out what he'd just spent the last three years missing out on.

It may or may not have all happened exactly like that, but that's pretty much what he remembers. After this long that's good enough.

  


**14.**

In his third year at the Academy he skipped a day, got a shuttle pass and went hiking alone in the Pyrenees. Halfway up a rock face he slipped down twelve feet and smacked into a ledge. The day ended with him sitting in the shuttle as the sun went down and sealing up three layers of skin over the gash in back of his thigh with an emergency dermal regenerator. He's still got the scar. Never did find out what he'd missed in class.

  


**15.**

He thinks of Wesley Crusher as the kid brother he never had, or maybe the son of the sister he never had. It's slightly uncomfortable to think of it the second way because he's never told Beverly how much he can remember of her night with Odan, or how clearly, or how it's one of those things that's never really faded away.

  


**16.**

He doesn't know where Thomas is. That is, he _knows_ where Thomas is, but he wouldn't know if that had changed. He wouldn't care apart from the security risk.

  


**17.**

Will prefers fruit to chocolate. Deanna says this is sort of like preferring heat to water: there's no reason they have to be mutually exclusive.

  


**18.**

Genetically, there is no telepathy or extrasensory ability in the Riker line for at least the last twelve generations. This does nothing to explain how he can make Deanna hear him, clear as day, or how he can pick up on her emotions even when she's stonewalling against everyone else in the world. He thinks if there is any argument for fate, or love at first sight, or everyone having a soul mate somewhere in the galaxy, they pretty much have to be it.

  


**19.**

Serving under Jean-Luc Picard is like having the father he really wanted when he was a kid, not the one he had to face when he put away his toy models of the _Enterprise-A_, the original _Hood_, the _Grissom_ and the _Stargazer_ and the _Excelsior_, and had to come out of his room and cook.

He's never told Picard how very sure he is that that little _Stargazer_ is still in storage back in Alaska.

  


**20.**

Will turned thirty-seven on his last birthday. It was his first one aboard the _Enterprise-E_. His gift from Deanna was a square of cream-colored woven paper as wide as his arm, intricately folded six times and signed with the seal of the Fifth House. It's hanging unfolded on the wall in his bedroom, looking to almost anyone just like an artifact from one or other of his travels over the years.

She has very neat handwriting, especially in her native script - and he loves the way she writes his name, but he still can't help being a little unnerved whenever he looks at it.

  


*

  



End file.
